CHAPTER X.
HARPER'S FERRY AND JOHN BROWN Mad Old Brown, Osawatomie Brown, With his eighteen other crazy men, went in and took the town.
-- EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN.
Three States meet at Harper's Ferry, and the line dividing two of them is indicated where it crosses the station platform.

If you alight at the rear end of the train, you are in Maryland; at the front, you are in West Virginia.

This I like.

I have always liked important but invisible boundaries--boundaries of states or, better yet, of countries.

When I cross them I am disposed to step high, as though not to trip upon them, and then to pause with one foot in one land and one in another, trying to imagine that I feel the division running through my body.
Harper's Ferry is an entrancing old town; a drowsy place, piled up beautifully, yet carelessly, upon terraced roads clinging to steep hills, which slope on one side to the Potomac, on the other to the Shenandoah, and come to a point, like the prow of a great ship, at the confluence of the two.
There is something foreign in the appearance of the place.